"TV Gospel Time": Little-Known Show Offers the Best of Black Church Music

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Over the past two days I’ve been watching quite a few YouTube videos of gospel music, including a quite remarkable TV show from 1962: TV Gospel Time (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wYzolJ6rR6k), which featured the Soul Stirrers, the Caravans and a quite good church choir from the Shady Grove Church in Memphis, Tennessee (one wonders if this was one of the Black churches Elvis Presley used to sneak into when he was growing up) that were as inspired as the other two more famous ensembles on the program. It was amusing that three of the four sponsors of the show – Sulfur-8 hair tonic, Artra Beauty Bar and Artra Skin Tone Cream – were products deliberately aimed at helping Black people look white, or at least look whiter. (The fourth sponsor was Feenamint chewing-gum laxative, which had also been the sponsor of George Gershwin’s radio program nearly 30 years earlier.) The market for these products pretty much disappeared in the late 1960’s as the civil-rights movement entered its more militant “Black Is Beautiful” phase, and the future of Black publications like Ebony and Jet magazines was put in jeopardy because the advertising revenue for those products dried up. (I remember seeing blues great Charles Brown in 1976 and being surprised that he was still “processing” his hair to make it look more straight; he obviously hadn’t got the memo that this look was considered decidedly declassé and retro then.)

The program was produced by Howard A. Schwartz and directed by Peter Brybac (or maybe Brysac) for a company called Allied Television, and the show was so obscure imdb.com has no listing either for TV Gospel Time or for Allied Television. One credit I give the director was that he was able to light his subjects so they actually look like Black people instead of black blobs, and the music is absolutely incredible and shows off how much all rock, blues, soul, R&B and even jazz owed to the music of the Black church. The program opened with the Shady Grove Choir – which I think was all female except for the lead singer, a man with an incredible soul voice, doing a song called “Old Campground.” The next group was the Caravans doing “Who Shall I Turn To?,” and though I’m not certain I suspect that the lead singer on this one was Cassietta George. I remember being blown away by her song “Walk Around Heaven All Day,” a gospel-themed rewrite of Frankie Laine’s 1949 hit “That Lucky Old Sun,” and thinking she could have had as big a career in secular soul music as Dinah Washington or Aretha Franklin if she’d wanted one. Instead, she stayed in the church and poured out her soulful singing on songs like these. I’m not sure whether George was in this group since her tenure with them was off-and-on, but it sure sounds like her. Then the host, James Farley, introduces an edition of the Soul Stirrers, one of those multi-generational groups that survived long after the disappearance or departure of all their original members.

The Soul Stirrers are best known as the group that launched Sam Cooke on his spectacular career, and though Cooke was long gone (though still alive) when this show was made, the edition of the Soul Stirrers here features the man who’d been Cooke’s co-lead singer during his tenure, Paul Foster. A lot of the Soul Stirrers’ records with Cooke and Foster played the two voices against each other, with Cooke’s high, pure, soaring tenor heading for the skies and Foster’s deeper, gruffier, almost James Brown-ish baritone keeping things grounded. Even without Cooke (or Johnnie Taylor, who was one of Cooke’s replacements and sounded very much like him; he was the lead singer on the Soul Stirrers’ 1960 record “Stand by Me, Father” which was often considered the ancestor of Ben E. King’s secular soul hit “Stand by Me” two years later) for balance, Paul Foster’s vocals here on “Must Jesus Bear This Cross Alone?” and, later in the program, “Keep Toiling On” are utterly amazing and impassioned. He’s seen with the other members of the Soul Stirrers off camera on “Must Jesus Bear This Cross Alone?” and with three other men (including a great guitar player) with their backs to the camera on “Keep Toiling On,” but it doesn’t matter. In between the two Soul Stirrers’ numbers come another great song by the Shady Grove Choir, “I Know I’m Born Again,” and two by the Caravans. One is called “When I Call Him Mine,” and not only does it sound like a girl-group record of the period (with a different lead singer, a softer voice more reminiscent of Diana Ross than Aretha Franklin) but they could have passed it off as one, since the lyrics don’t specify that the “Him” the singer calls her own is God.

The other song – with the woman I think is Cassietta George back on lead vocal – is “I’m a Soldier in the Army of the Lord,” and once again George (or whoever) shows off an utterly amazing soul voice. After those songs and the Soul Stirrers’ “Keep Toiling On” comes a final number by the Shady Grove Choir, though it looks like two members of the Caravans joined in, called “Meet Me at the River” that maintained the intensity level and once again made me wonder who the guy singing lead really was and why we’ve never heard of him again. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: all rock, blues, soul and R&B comes ultimately from the music of the African-American church, and this is a blessedly preserved document of that style of singing at its very best – though I get the feeling that any number of Black churches had singers and choruses every bit as good as the ones here and we just have no documentation of them.